MODULE 4

DIGITAL
PRINCIPLES AND
CONSEQUENCES
DIGITAL MEDIA AND
PRIVACY
Forty-five percent of the world’s population uses social
networks. That means a staggering 3.48 billion people connect
to some form of social media. These connections can leave
users vulnerable in several ways. When personal information
falls into the wrong hands, the consequences can be
damaging. In general, social media platforms, which collect
and store huge amounts of personal information with
limited governmental oversight, serve as attractive targets for
bad actors seeking to use that data to perpetrate fraud and
theft.
THREATS TO PRIVACY ON SOCIAL
MEDIA
Data Mining
Everyone leaves a data trail behind on the internet.
Every time someone creates a new social media
account, they provide personal information that
can include their name, birthdate, geographic
location, and personal interests. In addition,
companies collect data on user behaviors:
when, where, and how users interact with their
platform. All of this data is stored and leveraged by
companies to better target advertising to their
users. Sometimes, companies share users’ data
with third-party entities, often without users’
knowledge or consent.
Phishing Attempts
Phishing is one of the most common ways
criminals attempt to gain access to sensitive
personal information. Often in the form of an
email, a text message, or a phone call, a
phishing attack presents itself as a
message from a legitimate organization.
These messages trick people into sharing
sensitive data, including passwords, banking
information, or credit card details. Phishing
attacks often pose as social media platforms. In
August 2019, a massive phishing campaign
targeted Instagram users by posing as a
two-factor authentication system, prompting
users to log in to a false Instagram page.
Malware Sharing
Malware (malicious software) is designed to gain
access to computers and the data they contain. Once
malware has infiltrated a user’s computer, it can be
used to steal sensitive information (spyware), extort
money (ransomware), or profit from forced advertising
(adware). Social media platforms are an ideal delivery
system for malware distributors. Once an account has
been compromised (often by obtaining passwords
through a phishing attack), cybercriminals can take
over that account to distribute malware to all of the
user’s friends or contacts.
Botnet Attacks
Social media bots are automated accounts that create
posts or automatically follow new people whenever a
certain term is mentioned. A large group of bots can
form a network known as a botnet. Bots and botnets are
prevalent on social media and are used to steal data,
send spam, help cybercriminals gain access to
people’s devices and networks.
POLICY FOR INTERNET PRIVACY IN
INDIA
India's most comprehensive legal provisions that speak to
privacy on the internet can be found in the Information
Technology Act (ITA) 2000. The ITA contains a number of
provisions that can, in some cases, safeguard online privacy, or
in other cases, dilute online privacy. Provisions that clearly
protect user privacy include: penalizing child pornography,
penalizing, hacking and fraud and defining data protection
standards for body corporate.
Additionally, legislative gaps in the ITA serve to
weaken the privacy of online users. For example,
the ITA does not address questions and
circumstances like the evidentiary status of social
media content in India, merging and sharing of
data across databases, if users have the right to
be notified of the presence of cookies and
do-not track options, the use of electronic
personal identifiers across data bases, and if
individuals have the right to request service
providers to take down and delete their
personal content.
PRIVACY AND INDIAN
Privacy is a right that all human beings enjoy by virtue of their existence. It also
CONSTITUTION
extends to physical integrity, individual autonomy, free speech, and freedom
to move, or think.
This means that privacy is not only about the body, but extends to integrity,
personal autonomy, data, speech, consent, objections, movements, thoughts,
and reputation.
Therefore, it is a neutral relationship between an individual, group, and an individual
who is not subject to interference or unwanted invasion or invasion of personal
freedom.
All modern societies recognize that privacy is essential and recognize it not only
for humanitarian reasons but also from a legal point of view.
Privacy is our right to maintain the territory around
us, including everything that belongs to us, including
our bodies, homes, possessions, thoughts, feelings,
secrets, identities, etc.
Your privacy allows you to choose what parts of this area
can be accessed by others and to control the scope,
method, and duration of the parts you choose to disclose.
Article 21of The Constitution of India, 1949-Right to life and Personal Liberty
No person shall be deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure
established by law.
Art.21 is also known as the heart of the constitution, this right is granted to citizens of India as well
as the non-citizens. This fundamental right not only talks about life and liberty but it also covers wide
variety of rights. The interpretation of the term Personal Liberty has been discussed in many cases and
finally had a wider interpretation in the case of Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978) here the
Delhi Regional officer ordered the petitioner Maneka Gandhi to surrender her passport within 7 days
without giving her proper reason for the same.
The Supreme Court held that 'Personal Liberty' covered variety of rights and that such right could only
be taken away according to the procedure established by law which had to be just, fair and reasonable
and not arbitrary in nature. Personal liberty means various rights that provide for personal liberty of a
person.
In Article 21 the term Right to Life includes right to
participate in activities, right to tradition, heritage, culture,
livelihood and so on. One of the most important right to live also
includes Right to Privacy. Each and every human being would
want some privacy in their life. No one would want others to
intrude in their private space and disturb the happiness and
peace.

This right of privacy was not granted to the citizens for a long time
and there had been a lot of debate going on about the same, there
is no explicit provision in the constitution which emphasises about
the right to privacy. Even the data we save in our mobile phones
and laptops are also our private data which needs to be
protected, if the data is stolen our right to privacy is lost and
fundamental right is infringed. Unprotected data causes a
disturbance in the right to privacy.
The discussion about the right to privacy first came up in the case of Kharak
Singh V. The State of U.P.(1962) Kharak Singh's house was visited by the
police at strange hours, frequently waking him up from his sleep, it was held
by the court that this infringed his 'right to life' but however court dismissed
the petitioner's allegation that the shadowing of chronic criminals infringed
on his right to privacy as at that time the right to privacy was not recognised
as the Fundamental Right.
However, with the case of R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1994)
where this case prepared the way for subsequent decisions on the Right to
Privacy, paving the way for it to be included in the Fundamental Rights
given under Part III of the Constitution.
Right to privacy was just a mere right before it was made a fundamental
right. In the landmark case K.S. Puttaswamy V. Union of India which was
passed in the year 2017, Right to Privacy was recognised as Fundamental
Right and was then enshrined in Article 21 as a Right to life and personal
liberty.
 Presentation title 14

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 DIGITAL MONEY
• Digital money (or digital currency) refers to any means of
payment that exists in a purely electronic form. Digital
money is not physically tangible.
• Digital money is similar in concept and use to its cash
counterpart in that it can be a unit of account and a medium
for daily transactions. But it is not cash.
• Digital money is different from cash because it improves
upon the process for monetary transactions.
IMF
• Digital money is the digital representation of value. The
public sector can issue digital money called central bank
digital currency—essentially a digital version of cash that
can be stored and transferred using an internet or mobile
 Advantages of digital money are as follows:

•Digital money eliminates the need for physical storage

and safekeeping that is a characteristic of
cash-intensive systems. You do not need to invest in a
wallet or bank vaults to ensure that your money is not
stolen.
•Digital money simplifies accounting and
record-keeping for transactions through technology.
Therefore, manual accounting and separate
entity-specific ledgers are not necessary to maintain
records of transactions.
•While it has already shortened the amount of time and
the cost required to transfer money across borders,
digital money has the potential to further revolutionize
the remittance industry by eliminating intermediaries
•Digital money removes intermediaries in the
implementation of monetary policy and makes it
possible to include groups of people who were
previously excluded from the economy. For example,
those who are unbanked can still participate in an
economy by using digital money present in their
online wallet or mobile phones.
•In the case of cryptocurrencies, digital money
transactions can become censorship-resistant,
meaning they can be impervious to tracking by
government or other authorities.
The disadvantages of digital money are as
follows:

•Digital money use can compromise user privacy.

Cash is anonymous, and it is nearly impossible to
track and trace its users. On the other hand, digital
money can be traced. While the use of internet
cookies enables targeted advertising, the implications
for digital money tracking are more far-reaching. For
example, organizations or governments could
blacklist or freeze accounts without the permission of
users. They could also instigate double-accounting in
bank accounts, inflating expenses and reducing the
overall total.
•Digital money is susceptible to hacking. Even as it
removes the need for physical safekeeping, digital
money's origins in technology ensure that this form of
money becomes a target for hackers, who can steal
from digital wallets. A seamless financial
infrastructure consisting of digitally connected entities
can be brought down by hackers. The 2018 SWIFT
hacks, which affected multiple countries, are an
example. Hacks of digital money on a large scale
have the potential to bring a country's financial
infrastructure to heel and become a national security
threat.
•Digital money has its own set of costs. For
example, digital wallets are required to store
digital money. Cryptocurrencies also require
custody solutions that act as a failsafe against
hackers. Systems that use blockchains also
have to pay transaction fees, or the costs
associated with processing the transaction, to
miners.
•Digital money presents several challenges on
the governance and policy framework front. This
form of money is uncharted territory for
policymakers, and problems have already begun
emerging in its ecosystem.
The Panopticon legacy
As a work of architecture, the panopticon allows a watchman to observe
occupants without the occupants knowing whether or not they are being
watched. As a metaphor, the panopticon was commandeered in the latter
half of the 20th century as a way to trace the surveillance tendencies of
disciplinarian societies

The basic setup of Jeremy Bentham panopticon is this: there is a central

tower surrounded by cells.
In the central tower is the watchman. In the cells are prisoners – or
workers, or children, depending on the use of the building.
The tower shines bright light so that the watchman is able to see
everyone in the cells.
The people in the cells, however, aren’t able to see the watchman, and
therefore have to assume that they are always under observation.
Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish (1975) breathed new life into the concept of
panopticon. Foucault argued that the panopticon was being used as a disciplinary
mechanism in societies in order to subjugate its citizens.

Foucault looked at the use of power and its increasing bureaucratization in the modern world. He
studied torture and the emphasis on the sovereignty and power of the king.

In the period of Enlightenment, the prison system was introduced and was accepted as an
efficient means of punishment and a disciplinary mechanism that went beyond military or
religious arenas.
Owing to the seemingly persistent gaze of the prison supervisor, the panopticon served as both a
means of punishment and a form of discipline for the prisoners.
Today the panopticon is used to analyze surveillance in various
different settings such as the workplace, government
administration, and consumer contexts.
The importance of panopticon as a metaphor begins to fade when we
start thinking about whether modern forms of surveillance are analogous
to the central tower concept.
Does the fact that we do not know that we are being watched indicate
that we are being normalized in the way the panopticon was intended to
correct behavior?
In the panopticon the prisoners are constantly in fear of being
watched which is indeed the point.
However in the digital era, state surveillance on the internet is
almost impossible to locate. It is invisible; there is no visual marker
such as the central tower, no supervisor staring at you every time
you log into a webpage.
With Bentham’s conception of panopticon, and to
some extent the presence of CCTV, there is a
corporeal sense of exposure in the face of
authority.
A large chunk of our lives are spent online and we
share so much data every single day, but we do not
feel the same attachment to the data as we do for
our bodies.
Our data, however, is under surveillance, not
just by the government but also by
corporations looking to capitalizing on that
information.
In the age of social media we are constantly under a vast
grid of surveillance – of permanent visibility.
Social networks have made it a routine to engage its users
into self-reporting about what they are doing, reading,
thinking in the form of status updates.
The crowd reading the post are not only made aware of our
personal thoughts, feelings and preferences, but are also
acutely aware of our location.
In a lot of cases we are opting into these automated reporting
structures that detail our location at any given point in time.
This is done in exchange for simple pleasures like finding a
good local restaurant or a park without taking into account
the trade-off.
In other words we are in part responsible for contributing to
the panopticon culture – by willingly sharing our data and
our every movement, and status is made a matter of public
record.
Modern day panopticon architecture is omnipresent and
insidious. It no longer remains in the prison system but has
permeated towards society as a whole.
Panopticism in the digital era is more subtle in its nature, we are
forced to conform to norms and behave accordingly while never
actually being aware of the hold it has over us. The watchtower
has been replaced by security cameras and algorithms, police
presence and data trawlers.
The web of windows is replaced by procedures for data entry such
as microprocessors built into operating equipment, or the control
interfaces that record operator inputs, or daily system updates
provided by crafts workers in their remote field sites”
POST SNOWDEN
INTERNET POLICIES
The policies surrounding internet surveillance and privacy underwent significant scrutiny and
adjustments following the revelations brought to light by Edward Snowden in 2013. Snowden, a
former NSA contractor, leaked classified documents revealing extensive global surveillance
programs operated by the NSA and its international partners. These revelations led to widespread
public debate and calls for reform in internet policies. Here are some key developments that
occurred post-Snowden:

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Government Surveillance Reform: Snowden's revelations
prompted calls for reform of government surveillance practices in
various countries, particularly in the United States.
In the U.S., the passage of the USA Freedom Act in 2015
introduced some reforms to surveillance programs authorized under
the Patriot Act, including limitations on the bulk collection of
metadata. However, debates over the balance between national
security and civil liberties continue.

Increased Emphasis on Encryption: Snowden's disclosures

underscored the importance of encryption in protecting
communication and data from surveillance.
Tech companies, activists, and privacy advocates have pushed for
widespread adoption of encryption technologies to secure online
communications, leading to efforts to strengthen encryption
standards and protocols.
Privacy Legislation and Regulation: The revelations
spurred efforts to enact comprehensive privacy legislation
and regulations to protect individuals' rights to privacy and
control over their personal data.
Initiatives such as the European Union's General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR), implemented in 2018, set
stringent standards for data protection, privacy, and consent,
with significant penalties for non-compliance.

Corporate Transparency and Accountability: Technology

companies faced increased pressure to enhance transparency
and accountability regarding government requests for user
data.
Many companies began issuing transparency reports
detailing the number and nature of data requests received
from government agencies, as well as their responses to such
requests.
Global Scrutiny of Surveillance Practices: Snowden's
disclosures triggered global scrutiny of surveillance
practices by governments and intelligence agencies
worldwide.
International organizations, human rights groups, and
policymakers have called for greater transparency,
oversight, and accountability in surveillance activities to
uphold fundamental rights and democratic principles.

Public Awareness and Activism: Snowden's revelations

raised public awareness about government surveillance and
privacy risks associated with online activities.
This heightened awareness fueled activism and grassroots
movements advocating for digital rights, privacy
protection, and limitations on government surveillance
powers.
 Cyber Security
32
•Prevents Data Breaches
Protects sensitive information (personal, financial, academic) from unauthorized access.
•Ensures Privacy Protection
Safeguards user identity, communication, and personal activities from surveillance or misuse.
•Protects Financial Information
Reduces risks of fraud, identity theft, and unauthorized transactions.
•Maintains Data Integrity
Ensures that information is not altered, deleted, or tampered with by attackers.
•Builds User Trust
Strong security practices increase confidence in digital platforms and services.
•Prevents Malware and Cyber Attacks
Shields systems from viruses, ransomware, phishing, and spyware.
•Supports Safe Online Transactions
Enables secure e-commerce, banking, and digital payments.
•Ensures Regulatory Compliance
Helps organizations follow data protection laws and avoid legal penalties.
•Protects Intellectual Property
Prevents theft of research, creative work, and proprietary information.
•Reduces Financial Losses
Minimizes costs related to cyberattacks, recovery, and reputational damage.
•Enhances System Reliability
Keeps networks and systems running smoothly without disruptions.
•Promotes Responsible Digital Behavior
Encourages users to adopt safe practices like strong passwords and awareness of threats.
Download culture" refers to the digital, social, and economic
landscape driven by consumer demands for on-demand access to media—such
as songs, films, and cultural content—often shifting traditional consumption
patterns through digital platforms. Key aspects include:

Content Access: It signifies the ability to instantly obtain diverse media, from
music to digital, 3D-reconstructed historical sites.

Shifting Trends: This culture is heavily influenced by social geographies, new

media consumption, and the ability of users to be both consumers and, in some
contexts, curators of popular culture.
Specific Applications: It covers specialized apps like Culture, which allows
for renting, wearing, and returning items, or the Google Arts & Culture app for
exploring global heritage.
• Digital piracy refers to the illegal copying or distribution of copyrighted material via the Internet. It 34
negatively affects the creative industries, including film, TV, publishing, music and gaming.
• Online piracy has an economic impact, as it affects government revenue streams and puts you – the consumer – at risk
of financial loss. It also opens up security risks to consumers such as ID theft or exposing children to inappropriate
content.

A profitable crime
• Piracy services generate revenue through various means, including:
• Advertising: These sites may receive payment from advertisers based on the number of impressions or clicks.
• Donations: Some piracy services may ask users to donate money in exchange for access to premium content or to
support their site.
• Subscription services: Users may be able to access high-quality versions of pirated content or gain access to
“premium” content in exchange for a subscription fee.
• Selling user data: Some piracy services may sell user data, such as browsing history or personal information, to
third-party companies.
• Affiliate marketing: Piracy services may generate revenue by referring users to the sites or products from online
retailers.
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